Dan BrockwellBuilding the toolkit to find your own leads as an SDR ultimately gives reps a better sense of what customers & personae are the right fit, improves the depth of personalisation in first conversations, and reduces performance risk when centralised lead lists dry up.
But working out where to start and how to do this efficiently can be messy.
Thatâs why weâve put together a guide on how to find companies, contacts and the right details to reach out
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) đ¤
One of the biggest silent reasons for rep underperformance: theyâre focused on speaking to the wrong businesses in the first place.
In an ideal world, you want to be speaking to businesses where:
- Theyâve identified strong pain(s)
- Your product maps well to their pains
- They have the financial resources to purchase a solution
- They have the right people, skills & internal infrastructure to use your product well
- Theyâre growing quickly
To create an environment where reps can reliably self-prospect, there needs to be a shared understanding of what businesses are and arenât a fit.
How to Segment Prospects đ
Over time, youâll form a pointed hypothesis about the types of businesses that fall into this ideal bucket. This will be unique for every business, but there are a few common criteria that a lot of businesses will consider when narrowing who to focus on:
- Industry Vertical
- B2B vs. B2C businesses
- Brick & mortar businesses
- Software businesses
- Service-based businesses
- Highly regulated industries e.g. medicine, mining, law, finance
- Location
- Located in specific markets
- Headquarted locally vs. overseas
- Recently expanded to X country
- Number of locations / stores
- Headcount
- Overall number of employees
- Number of employees in a specific country
- Number of employees in a specific department e.g. marketing, engineering, sales, HR
- Number of remote employees
- Financials
- Valuation
- Revenue
- $X+ existing spend on a certain area
- Existing Product Usage
- Using Google Ads
- Using Salesforce
- Using Slack
- Using a legacy competitor
Identifying Which Criteria Drive ICP đĄ
For a business that already has customers, the best way to understand your ICP is to analyse patterns across your sales & customer lifecycle in terms of where youâve seen the strongest outcomes.
Questions you may want to consider in doing so:
- Which types of meetings had the highest conversion rate to deals?
- Which types of customers had the shortest sales cycle?
- Which types of customers spent the most money on your product?
- Which types of customers engaged most with the product?
- Which types of customers had the highest retention?
- Which types of customers become referrers of other customers?
ICP is ultimately something that can evolve as you continue sales conversations and see how onboarded customers engage & retain. For reps on the front line, if youâre noticing certain patterns in the types of customers who are responding best to your outreach and conversations, double down on that niche!
Finding Relevant Accounts đ˘
So where do you actually find new companies? This is again something thatâs quite contextual to industry, but here are a few sources to consider in your workflow.
- LinkedIn:Â LinkedInâs default search on the companies tab allows you to filter businesses by location, industry & headcount, as well as whether they have active job listings and whether you have 1st connections at that company
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator:Â This is a paid tier beyond the standard LinkedIn search experience which allows for deeper filtering and list-building features, including the ability to search by revenue, headcount growth & technologies used.
- Google Maps / Google Business Listings:Â Businesses outside the professional services & software verticals may not have an active presence on LinkedIn e.g. a lot of brick-and-mortar stores. Using Google Maps & Google Search is often an easier way to find these type of businesses, particularly when your sales reps are segmented by geographic territories.
- Industry Associations: A lot of industries will have a governing body, union, association or business network that aggregates a large number of prospects in the space e.g. Master Builders Australia in the construction space
- Crunchbase:Â A strong global database specifically for tech companies, with a key advantage being the ability to filter by funding level/investors (which may be relevant for some ICPs).
- LLMs:Â Try asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude for a list of businesses matching certain criteria. To get a higher number of results, you can prompt for additional answers, though for some platforms, the paid version may be required to get deeper analysis.
- Competitor Websites:Â Competitors will often list logos, case studies & testimonials from brands they work with. Just because someoneâs had a good experience with a competitor, doesnât mean theyâre off limits to switching or even just using multiple products. However, youâll want to reach out with a clear insight into common problems their customers face that arenât solved for by their existing product.
In saying all this, another critical list of prospects to consider is old leads in your companyâs CRM that have not been contacted in a while. Some notable categories to consider:
- Closed Lost leads where the reason was timing
- Closed Lost leads where the reason was budget and economic conditions have changed / the company has grown / itâs a new FY
- Closed Lost leads where they didnât have enough employees/revenue at the time for the product to be a fit
- Closed Lost leads that had previously come inbound
- Leads where the business has never been able to get in touch before
In re-engaging with these leads, youâll likely need to revise either your messaging approach or which contacts you engage with, acknowledging any relevant changes to your product or their business that may change the outcome.
Finding Relevant Contacts đ
In your sales motion, we typically recommend reaching out to 2-4 contacts from a business, however this can vary depending on business size & complexity of role ownership.
This may be people who directly feel the pain your product solves (an Influencer or Champion), people responsible for the business outcomes your product drives (a Decision Maker), or people who approve purchase decisions in your category (Economic Buyers).
To find relevant contacts at your shortlist of businesses, here are a few sources to consider:
- LinkedIn:Â The default choice for selling into professional services or tech.
- Company Websites:Â The About Us, Team & Careers pages will often have a list of key individuals working at the companies and their roles/backgrounds.
- Media:Â If the business has been mentioned in the media before, a Google News search may bring up the names of key individuals.
- Other Social Media:Â In some categories, particularly brick-and-mortar stores, the owner and key employees may be featured on Instagram & Facebook pages.
Finding Contact Information đ¤
There are a lot of debates around the best place to find phone numbers, with tools like Lusha, ContactOut, Apollo, Firmable & ZoomInfo often being mentioned.
To maximise connect rate, we recommend using multiple solutions, as each database has its own gaps and errors.
For startups, picking two of Lusha/ContactOut/Apollo/Firmable is a solid start. ZoomInfo is more expensive but has strong lead coverage, and may be worth considering as you scale.
At Earlywork, we use a mix of Lusha, ContactOut & Firmable.
In doing so, you may find multiple numbers for one person, and best ensure you get the up-to-date number at their current workplace to call.
Some tools are also better for certain sectors so look online to see what other teams are using for your ICP.
If you canât find individual mobiles for target prospects at SMBs, a landline can usually be found on the website or Google Business Listing.
These tools all capture prospect email data as well.
Improving Prospecting Efficiency âď¸
Batching Outside Calling Hours
To improve productivity during calling blocks and make the most of the finite calling window available, we recommend reps batch their prospecting either at the start or end of each day, outside calling hours.
Typically, this will be 30 mins to 1 hour depending on the number of accounts youâre working with.
Doing it at the end of the day means reps can come in the next morning and hit the ground running on calls.
Leveraging Virtual Assistants
An even bigger unlock to consider: outsourcing some or all of your prospecting workflow to virtual assistants. This depends on the complexity and nuance involved in your customer set, but with sufficient documentation around your ICP and around how to use prospecting tools, you can achieve a lot here at surprisingly low cost.
Tasks you could outsource to a VA:
- Scraping Google Maps, LinkedIn or industry websites to find a shortlist of relevant accounts
- Creating a shortlist of relevant contacts for a provided list of accounts
- Populating a list of contacts with relevant contact information
